Impulse Engine
It’s the first entry, but I’m already going to throw in a couple curveballs. Spell: The RPG was already well in development in 2014 but wouldn’t see publication until the following year. However, in the meantime, I was considering the Impulse Engine as a unifying mechanical baseline to my games. In much the same way that the Storyteller System underlies the World of Darkness games, I would have a design language that stretched across the games I would make as Whimsy Machine. That was the plan, at least.
Rewinding to that Changeling adaptation project, I wrote up a system of “Impulses” to represent the human side of our human-fae hybrid characters. The players were supposed to pick a “Crowd” for their character and then assign three of the twelve Impulses of their choice to their character. There was a branching set of abilities based on those Impulses, and the whole thing was a bit messy on top of everything else. It was eventually, and understandably, cut.
A little while later, I’d trim off the specific abilities and pull the Impulses out of that Crowd structure. This set of twelve stats would end up being the missing second half to the system I was working on with letter tiles—the game that would become Spell. I was happy with this translation of these mechanics and decided I could turn them into a system base. I worked backwards from Spell, pulling out the letter-magic to leave room for other setting-specific gimmicks to plug into the neutral foundation. It was going to be great.
The three games that got any sort of legs with the Impulse Engine, aside from Spell, were Lightsome Noon, Trumpsummoner, and Reliquists. Lightsome Noon is a sci-fi game that uses a digital world/real world setup like Digimon, the Matrix, or Code Lyoko. Its special mechanic was using double-six domino tiles that chain together and then activate in certain ways when the d6s were rolled. I never quite figured out how to make it work and learned an important lesson along the way: I was forcing the gimmick. The setting is something I’ve always enjoyed, however, so I could see bringing this one out of the dark eventually.
Trumpsummoner got a bit further. The unfortunate name was pre-2016 and based on trumps in card games. It used a deck of regular playing cards to summon monster friends to help you out. It’s a fun core that I’d love to revisit, but it’ll need a rebrand. To peel away some veneer, I just went back and reread it and, wow, it was a lot farther along than I realized. This is a functional game that I never published. Likely because I felt that books needed to look more like what I was playing at the time: big, hardcover affairs full of pictures, flavor text, and appendices.
Much of the spirit of Trumpsummoner—summoning monsters and creature companions—would live on in one of the new bonus chapters added to the 2018 edition of Spell: The RPG. While the mechanics are very different, relying on Spell’s letters instead of a deck of cards, this has always been a theme I’ve loved in media and will continue to shoehorn into whatever games I can.
Lastly, Reliquists started its life as a New World of Darkness (aka Chronicles of Darkness) supernatural type. Players took the roles of the titular Reliquists—characters who share a soul bond with a specific object. They tap into the theme of that object to access heightened abilities. For example, a bond with a paintbrush meant magic paintings or a lantern for supernatural perception. It was a real passion project for a while. I even ran a short campaign. This system was robust (31 skill tracks with ten levels each) if a bit straightforward. I liked it, though—still do, even.
I tried to rebuild Reliquists using the Impulse Engine. While I made decent progress in outlining the setting, the mechanics themselves would be the most basic of these three games. Instead of dominos or a deck of cards, Reliquists had a bonus die that was split between the rest of the dice you’d roll per usual. All three games used a system of DIY keywords to define, empower, and limit individual abilities. Pretty much, these keywords filled in what I saw as the gap left by taking out Spell’s spells. I was trying, unnecessarily, to maintain that “absolutely open-ended” feel of Spell.
Reading through some of my early writing, a lot of the development was in defiance of my complaints of World of Darkness’ systems. It would take me a while to lessen the importance of “originality” or attempting to create something better than, instead of just good for its own sake. I benefited, some years later, from experimenting and playing with different designs, but I always look back on these plans for the Impulse Engine as a “what could’ve been” moment.
I’m currently designing a new edition of Spell: The RPG, which includes a revision of the Impulses and some of the core mechanics. If there was any time to come back to these projects, it would be now. I have a terrible habit—and I suspect this will be a recurring theme throughout this review—of wildly underestimating old projects. I seem to remember things as far less developed than they are. While that does lead to the occasional pleasant surprise, like with Trumpsummoner, it mostly causes me to write off the old stuff as not worth resurrection, like with Trumpsummoner. Sometimes that’s for the best, sure, but sometimes… Well, I wonder.
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